Faculty Member Co-Creates Game Nominated for Casual Connect’s Indie Prize

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Roy Papp, a Course Director in Full Sail’s Game Design Master’s degree program, is the co-owner of a local indie game company called Zygobot. Together with his business partner John Amos, a lead UI artist at FanDuel, the two have been building mobile games since 2013.

Their most recent creation, “Divey Jones Bitey Shark,” has received a nomination for Casual Connect’s 2015 Indie Prize contest. This free-to-play mobile game, created for iOS and Android, features Divey Jones and his sister Divey Jayne diving as deep as they can into shark-infested waters.

“After publishing our first game ‘Divey Jones Ocean Odyssey,’ we wanted to continue building off of it was a brand. So we started a sequel that was a variation on the endless runner genre where you would dive as deep as possible. We were adding new creatures and content and one of them was a shark,” says Roy. “I thought, ‘What if I make a level with just sharks?’

“The shark-only level was fun and lent itself to a short play experience perfect for the bus stop. People who played the level were having such a good time, so I put it into the game as an Easter egg. But after a little more thinking we decided that putting it out as a full game would be beneficial to bridge the gap between product releases for Zygobot.”

The game will be showcased at this year’s Casual Connect showcase, held in San Francisco August 11-13. Roy and John were also asked to be guest speakers, and will be giving a Postmortem lecture about the making of “Divey Jones.”

“We were excited to find out that we were nominated to participate in this event,” says Roy, “and to be sharing our game with publishers and leaders in the game industry.”